⚠️ 2026 Update: This method is not 100% perfect. Since writing this post I have occasionally gotten OnStar emails from GM reporting things about the car. Isolating radio signals is hard!

Last year I purchased my first modern connected vehicle. As Mozilla has previously reported, modern vehicles capture (and sell) data about your behavior (how you drive, where you live, where you drive to, what your sexual orientation is). As such, I decided to look into the process of disabling OnStar.

Thanks to Imgur I found a way to (reversibly, not permanently) disable OnStar. In short, because OnStar will still report data back to General Motors and their data brokers even if you don't pay for OnStar (as best I can tell), the only way to truly protect your privacy is to either live in California where you can request to opt out of data collectin via the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) or disable the OnStar hardware. Given that I don't live in California, I opted for the latter approach.

My thanks to BiggRanger on Imgur for originally documenting this process. I followed their instructions but still ran into some difficulty so I am re-documenting this with more information about the process.

Have you noticed that all the examples on Apple's website, on Medium, and by prominent SwiftUI bloggers only use List views for the sidebar(s) and don't have a NavigationStack in the final detail view that they push additional content onto? There's a reason for that, and unfortunately it's not a pleasant one.

If you're looking to build a seemingly simple split-view app with a 1-depth sidebar and an n-depth detail view, using List in the sidebar view is a fine choice. But if you do not want the cookie-cutter look and feel List is not your friend. Unfortunately, NavigationSplitView really, really wants you to use List and if you don't use one then don't you dare try to programmatically push more content onto the detail view's navigation stack.

This split view demo from WWDC looks great, but what if your side-bar UI would look better if it were layed out as a grid?